Sweet Read online

  “Hello, Pearl—welcome home,” Thomas said. He was halfway across the parlor by the time he noticed the tension permeating the room. His smile faded. “What’s going on?”

  “Your daughter doesn’t want to go to medical school.” Mama’s voice was clipped. Plus she made it sound like I had no plan for my future at all.

  “Oh?” Thomas appeared more intrigued than concerned.

  “I’ve been accepted into the doctoral program in marine biology. Here.”

  Paused in the center of the room as though unsure whether he should stay or retreat, he glanced from my face to hers and back. “That’s… interesting. What made you change your mind?”

  “She is not changing her mind!” Mama interjected, as if nothing I’d said could breach her denial. “She’s still on the waitlist at Harvard. She could hear from them any day.”

  “Mama, it doesn’t matter—”

  “What we’ve worked for all your life doesn’t matter? What your father sacrificed his life for doesn’t matter?”

  I sucked in a breath, feeling the mention of my father like a blow to the chest. She’d told me their story—my story—once, in halting, hushed sentences, but she’d never cited his name as an inducement or reproach. Of course, she’d never felt the need. Until now.

  “Essie…,” Thomas began.

  She said no more, her lips pressed into a taut line.

  My parents—young, in love, and pregnant, had run to escape a Mexican drug cartel defended by a gang he’d become involved with—leaving everything and everyone they’d ever known—to see me born in the US. To make a new life for the three of us. To give me opportunities they’d never had and a future safe from the violence under which they’d come of age. My father, not quite twenty, had fallen ill and died during the crossing in an overheated, airless truck; my teenaged mother had braved the loss of the boy she adored and separation from family and friends, and I’d been born on US soil—their first dream for me.

  Mama cleaned motel rooms and houses while teaching herself to speak and write English flawlessly and attaining her citizenship. My earliest memories were not playdates or preschools, but libraries where helpful librarians kept me entertained with stacks of books and educational videos while my mother mastered computer skills. Her ambition paid off, and she eventually became the office manager of a busy pediatric practice. A few years later, she met Dr. Thomas Frank, whom she held at arm’s length until she was sure he understood and accepted her priority: me.

  My phone beeped a message notification—a welcome interruption, no matter who’d sent it. Glancing at the screen, I said, “I have laundry to do,” as I bolted from the room and up the curving staircase.

  Boyce: Still hanging out with Dover, huh?

  Me: You know she hates when you call her that.

  Boyce: If you’re trying to convince me to stop, that’s one regretful line of reasoning right there. JS

  Me: As in I just gave you impetus to call her that more. *sigh*

  Boyce: If impetus means ALL THE REASONS, then yes.

  The first time I first heard Boyce call Melody Dover was a year or so after his playground brawl with boys in his grade. I’d defended him to Principal Jaynes after that fight. I’d never tattled on anyone before, but no one else was on Boyce’s side. I had to do it. Tall, with a head of solid silver, square-shorn hair, an angled nose and sharp jaw, our elementary principal made students cower without speaking a word. My hands shook and my stomach threatened to heave as I recounted the ugly things those boys said about his mother. I was never sure if it was my testimony that helped him escape punishment, but I liked to think I’d paid back a little of what I owed him for saving my life.

  Mama normally bought me one pair of new shoes at the beginning of each school year and another in the spring. But in the middle of third grade, my feet sprang forward two sizes after a growth spurt that only included my feet, so we went to the Thrifty Sense for something secondhand to tide me over. I went bananas for a glittery pair of sneakers marked five dollars, and Mama consented to buy them after asking multiple times, “Are you sure you’ll want to wear these every day until spring break?” I’d nodded and begged until, sighing, she consented.

  Melody Dover was a year ahead of me in school and one of the rich girls, so I’d been completely off her radar. Until I showed up at school in a pair of her castoffs.

  “Look! That little turd is wearing my shoes!” she exclaimed to a trio of friends during recess. “They still have the dumb pink shoelaces I bought for them.”

  They all laughed or said, Oh my God! I kept walking toward the swing sets as if I hadn’t heard them, but my vision swam and my face heated.

  “Hey, you—those shoes were mine until I got tired of them and gave them away.”

  I stumbled, wishing I could melt and soak right into the ground.

  “Bet you had to give them away because your big, fat, flappy feet outgrew them, Dover.”

  I recognized the voice addressing her, but I didn’t turn around.

  “Shut up, Boyce, you stupidhead. And don’t call me by my last name! I’m not a boy!”

  “Oooooh noooo, Dover called me a stupidhead.” He laughed. “I think her bark is worse than her bite. Dover, Dover, Rover Dover—woof.”

  His friends howled with laughter and started barking and repeating Rover Dover while Melody screeched for them to stop, and I kept walking away, no longer the object of her ridicule.

  She had no memory of me or those shoes, evidenced by the first time we officially met—five years later, on our first day of tenth grade. I’d skipped ninth grade entirely, thanks to my stepfather’s money, which paid for tests confirming my academic skill level. Though I was happy to be more intellectually challenged, advancing up meant the loss of my few friends. I barely recognized anyone in my first three classes, and no one seemed to recognize me in my new wardrobe of brand-name clothes. Depressed, I veered into the girls’ restroom just before lunch, contemplating hiding in a stall for the rest of the hour.

  Melody Dover was leaning over the chipped sink, staring into the mirror, sobbing and trying in vain to repair her dissolving mascara at the same time.

  My first impulse was to turn around and leave before she saw me. She was spoiled and bitchy—something I’d experienced firsthand. “Um, are you okay?” I asked. I could have kicked myself. I shouldn’t have cared if she was wretchedly miserable. She probably deserved it.

  She turned, sniffling, the pale skin under her eyes smudged dark. “Everything sucks. Everything. My boyfriend is being a dick, my parents are assholes, and I just had a wicked fight with my best friend, who is being a total bitch!”

  I stepped closer and handed her a clean paper towel, and she renewed her efforts to blot the mascara from under each eye. I’d never had a boyfriend. My mother and new stepfather indulged and supported me completely. I had friends, but no one I could claim as best who would also claim me. And I’d never fought with any of them.

  Mascara blotted, Melody heaved a sigh and managed to look like a beautiful, sad girl. No red, running nose. No blotchy skin. No fair.

  “Hey, those shoes are really adorable,” she said, sniffling again. “Where’d you get them?”

  For a moment, I thought she was alluding to those damned silver sneakers I’d dreaded lacing up day after day for two months, even though she’d never spoken another word to me. But her pale green eyes were wide and sincere. She had no recollection of what she’d done to me five years earlier, or my association with the nickname Boyce had invented that still made her livid.

  “Barney’s. In New York?” I answered.

  Since I was only thirteen, Mama and Thomas had taken me along on their honeymoon. We’d stayed in a suite at the Plaza, where I had my own room and watched television all night in the king-sized bed in an attempt to obstruct all thoughts about what was going on in the adjacent bedroom. We’d spent our days shopping and visiting places like the Empire State Building and MoMA and Ground Zero. Evenings, w
e walked through Times Square and saw a Broadway show and ate at restaurants that made Mama nervous about silverware use and what she was wearing. Thomas had smirked in a charmingly smitten sort of way and told her she could eat her mushroom risotto with her soupspoon or her roasted duck breast with her dessert fork for all he cared.

  “You went shopping in New York? Lucky!” Melody said. “Mama and I go shopping in Houston every spring break, but that’s not even the same.”

  I shrugged, unsure what to say to a girl I’d wanted to punch in the nose for years, who was now regarding me with jealous admiration. We exited the bathroom together minutes later, and had been friends ever since.

  Me: Melody told me about your dad. I would say I’m sorry…

  Boyce: Yeah, don’t waste your sympathy.

  Boyce: See you around while you’re home?

  I stared at his question, harmlessly asked—another behind it. Mama’s words rose up: You’ve never been afraid of any challenge—never in your life. Untrue. So untrue.

  I’d confided in one person when I received that acceptance e-mail over winter break. Not my boyfriend. Not Melody or my sorority sisters. Not my university peers—the ones applying for and in many cases not being accepted into leading graduate programs. Not my parents.

  But I’d told Boyce without hesitation. I’d told him in the voice of someone who wasn’t planning to follow that dream and disillusion everyone she knew in the process.

  He’d taken one look at me and gotten straight to the heart of everything. “When are you going to stop being afraid to live your life, Pearl?”

  No one ever asked me that. No one knew it. I was the valedictorian of our high school class. I’d gone away to college and worked my ass off, graduating with highest honors. I’d been accepted into more than one of the most prestigious medical schools in the country. I looked like I had life by the scruff of the neck, but that was an illusion. Because I was scared to death of who I really was and what I really wanted. And somehow he knew. He’d always known.

  Me: Yes. I’ll be here all summer.

  chapter

  Five

  Boyce

  I wasn’t sure when Pearl would leave for medical school, or even where she’d decided to go, but she said she’d be around all summer. Which meant her boyfriend might come around again. He’d been here for a week last year, chatting up her parents and making douchebag cracks about the place we’d grown up. I’d only been around him twice, but it had taken a shit-ton of self-control to keep my fist from bashing all the jabs about our hometown right back into his mouth. He’d paraded his intelligence like it gave him the excuse to be a superior fuck to her too.

  After he finally vamoosed, Pearl and I met up at our spot along the beach—an alcove cut into the dunes where one of the island’s hotel monstrosities had built a private boardwalk to the public beach. Not many people came and went through the locked gate once it was dark, and the dunes—full of cactus and wild vegetation and the occasional snake—screened the beachside portion of the boardwalk from the lit patios and balconies of the hotel’s occupants.

  When I got there, she’d looked up from one of the wide, sandy steps and asked what I thought of him.

  “He’s a prick,” I said, lowering myself next to her.

  “Wow. Tell me what you really think.”

  I shrugged. “You asked, so I assumed you wanted the truth.” She nodded, so I went one step further. “I don’t like how he talks to you. I think he could hurt you, and it had better go no further than emotional damage or I’ll have to end him.”

  She’d rocked back, head angling to the side like it did whenever she was trying to work out something complicated. Funny, considering I’ve always been anything but. Boyce Wynn: what you see is what you get.

  “Jesus, Boyce. What did he say to make you think that?”

  “It’s not what he says so much as how he says it.”

  She frowned. My answer wasn’t good enough for a girl who lived and breathed hard facts.

  “Are you… jealous? I know Mitchell had access to opportunities you didn’t have, and his family is supportive of his academic ambitions. But they aren’t rich or anything.”

  She thought I was jealous of her boyfriend’s awesome childhood or his fancy education? Fuck me. “Nothing to do with money or opportunities I wouldn’t want even if they were offered. He’s smart. I get it. And he makes damned sure everybody knows it.”

  I didn’t know how to tell her that his bluster reminded me of my father, who’d terrorized everyone who could have cared about him because he’d known that he was a gutless coward, too scared to quit the bottle. His bullying hid his weakness. Her boyfriend was the opposite of my dad on the surface, but he was hiding something. Whatever it was, that motherfucker had concealed it well enough to fool her.

  “So you don’t like him because he’s smart?”

  Hell, she was clueless sometimes. “Yeah, that’s it. Good thing Maxfield isn’t a fucking brain, or I’d have had to hate his ass. Oh, wait.”

  She rolled her big brown eyes. “He’s different.”

  If I hated people for being smart, I’d have been screwed day one. Pearl was the smartest person I’d ever known, and my best buddy from high school was right behind her—graduating from the same giant university, about to head north to some sort of bioengineering job in Ohio. “Yeah. Maxfield is different. He’s not an asshole.”

  “Well, y’all have been friends forever—”

  I laughed. “Not forever. We beat the shit out of each other in ninth grade.” Right after the worst summer of my life, when we got the news that Brent had been killed in Iraq two months before he was eligible to get out. I’d expected to escape my father but instead found myself the sole target of his untempered rages. For some reason, Maxfield was the guy I took it all out on. Maybe because he was the only one brave (or idiotic) enough to call me on my shit.

  I’d been on an unswerving path to become my father, and I hadn’t even seen it.

  “Melody told me about that fight, but I thought she was exaggerating.”

  “No exaggeration. I got this from it.” I pointed to the small scar near my right eye and grinned. “No worries. He’s got one too. We were opposite ends of a fuckup stick for a while there.”

  A smile touched her mouth and she shook her head, turning to stare out into the dark, arranging her thoughts before she spoke, as she always had. I stared at her, waiting for it. The moon was only a sliver over the water, softening the contours of her face, and starlight flickered in her eyes. The collapse and retreat of waves on the sand echoed the familiar soundtrack of our lives.

  “I don’t expect you to be friends with Mitchell,” she said. “That would be awkward.”

  Yeah. That would be awkward. I’d wanted her for too many years. She was the bad habit I’d never broken, because I didn’t fucking want to.

  “I may be jealous, but jealousy isn’t why I don’t trust him,” I said, and she turned her face to mine. I wanted to fall into the deep wells of her eyes. “I protect you, Pearl. It’s just what I do.”

  • • • • • • • • • •

  Brent protected me until the day he left town. Our whole lives, he insisted that Dad was full of shit and I should pay no mind to his opinion of me or anything else. He blocked my punishments, deserved or undeserved—sometimes physically, but usually by negotiation. My brother was a born peacemaker, the kind of kid who’d stepped in to referee neighborhood disputes before fists could fly, which made his decision to join the Corps at eighteen all the more incredible to me. At ten, I thought all Marines were guys who liked to fight and shoot people.

  He planned to serve four years, then go reserve and come get me. “If I believed they’d let me take you from him now, I would—but nobody lets little kids choose their guardians. And I’m barely an adult.” He paced the airless room we shared at the ass-end of the trailer. He’d just graduated from high school and would leave for boot camp in California in August, when I
began fifth grade. “When I get out, I’ll be older. You’ll be older—in high school. I’ll get a decent job. We’ll move to Corpus, and he’ll never lay a hand on either of us again.”

  My brother was also a dreamer, but I figured that’s how heroes were—it’s how they changed the world—by dreaming how it should be, superimposed over how it was. I wanted to believe what he told me. I wanted to believe that when Brent came back Dad would be so glad to get rid of my sorry ass that he’d let me go.

  Brent went to San Diego, and then Quantico, and a year later, after 9/11, to Afghanistan. After earning distinction for marksmanship in boot camp, he made lance corporal and then became a scout sniper. When I was fourteen, he was sent to Iraq. Dad hung a US flag in the window of the garage and accepted praise from everyone who stopped by to yack about how proud he must be to have a son serving our country—as if he’d had any fucking thing to do with it. As if he weren’t the dead reverse of everything Brent stood for.

  I hadn’t been born with my brother’s ability to defuse anger; I’d inherited my mother’s knack for throwing fuel on it without even trying. It didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say—I was the only one left to trigger his drunken rages. I was the motherfucking dipshit, the worthless dumbass, the pansy-assed son of a bitch, the useless shit-for-brains moron. I swallowed every word, except where Pearl was concerned. I’d done my one good deed when I saved her life, and I knew it.

  When she came up to the middle school, she was still tiny and so quiet. She seemed more defenseless than ever. I didn’t notice when she sat down at the end of the table Rick and I had commandeered for lunch the year before. The outcast table, we called it—but that didn’t mean just any weirdo could plant his ass at it.

  “Hey, dipshit—sixth graders don’t sit with us,” Rick said. He and I were dicked around enough by eighth grade jocks without welcoming guys who’d just be a magnet for more of their shit. I glanced up, expecting to see some skinny kid moving his ass along. But the person sliding her tray off the table was Pearl Torres.